xi. If instability in India gradually came to an end, after a decade and a half, the hoteliers might get business again.
If the hoteliers got business again, especially those that converted their erstwhile royal palaces into hotels, it implied the same could be done with some of the royal palaces in Europe. These would have European ownership, the benefits of a particular kind of economy since 2013 could dissipate.
The urgency couldn't be worse.
Antara might find herself kicked up to 'where she belonged', while continuing to live in Delhi, as mid-grade bankers ran through Europe to find out who had a problem with Islamabad's rising profile.
Who had a problem!
With the above in mind, if a former POTUS had set himself the task of gathering information, on behalf of militaries, about how Antara's life unfolded in the mid-1990s, as she went to Kolkata for college, she'd find it hard to protest.
No one at home had any idea of staying at a hostel because they had never done so.
Ajit had gone to Kolkata with a govt job/engineer, around 1960-61, he was in his early 20s, he stayed at a boarding for working men, it was located at Entally in central Kolkata (the "Entally Mess").
"For the first time in my life, I was free to eat eggs, I ate six or seven eggs a day, sometimes eight or nine, whenever I could, boiled, poached, omelettes, I lived on eggs," Ajit would say later in life.
That's how he survived, Anjali would explain.
Ajit's office was located at the New Secretariat Building, next to the Hooghly River, Kolkata's first swanky high-rise, several changes of tramways from central Kolkata to reach his office, "I hardly walked, often I ran, to be young and so free."
Antara, on the other hand, was going away from the relative freedom of home (where one could do as one pleased), the stolidity of Anjali (Ajit had grown up without a mother), agreeing to take the family suitcase to Brabourne hostel but not agreeing to the trunk (Antara found it cumbrous, unwieldy).
Was that what the former POTUS wanted to know, Dems were one thing, why Antara wanted to stay away from the GOP as well?
It was clear the Cold War's end had not left a better world, that she'd be defined in a certain way, she won't "run free" like Ajit and his Entally Mess friends, at every step she and her generation would have to defend Asansol AG Church till one day they found out about Tobe Hooper and Texas Chainsaw.
What did I do? Whose discipline did I enact, what did I represent?
Antara should have been careful when they sang the school anthem,
"...Onward moves our banner/Onwards do we go/Marching in with honour/Singing Victory song..."
There you go, Victory bonds (WWI) and TV Soong, Antara had been singing at school about her own irrelevance.
Another way of looking at it was from Brabourne.
Those like Antara, Noida, Jayanti-di (all Asansol AG) or even Sujata S, Sandy, Jyotsna (Loreto Asansol) had provided their own Victory bonds/debt securities to those in Kolkata, lending the presence of those hallowed institutions to Kolkata city, for assistance in their time of need.
Over the last two years, Antara didn't see any sign of that assistance, apparently Antara was an unknown entity ('eta abar ke re'/who was this woman), she had fantastic ideas of herself, she was looking for immigration touts or shortcuts.
There was no question of Kolkata repaying that earlier debt to Brabourne.
On the first day of her joining Junior College Brabourne in the mid-1990s, while waiting outside the Hotel Superintendent's office for her turn to complete the paperwork, Antara had overheard Shanti-di, the Superintendent (called 'Grendel' by generations of Brabourne Hostel students, a fierce Old English creature) discussing with the hostel matrons,
"Hans (duck) as well as dak (duck)? Duckduck? How was that possible?"
Karl Hass, German SS war criminal, might have been a monarchist.
Captain Lightoller (RMS Titanic), an anti-monarchist, stayed at 1, Duckworth Place in London, also called 1 Duck's Walk.
Who had set up such a play within Brabourne Hostel?
June 20, 2026.
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